Optimum design of a wide band six-port power divider with selectable power division ratios by the method of least squares

An effective design procedure is devised for the optimum design of a versatile and useful six-port planar microstrip power divider. An equivalent circuit is developed for the divider, which is composed of line sections and asymmetrical T-junctions. The method of least squares is applied to the equivalent circuit of the divider for its optimum design. This power divider is capable of providing various power division ratios for different combinations of the output ports ( e.g. three or two outputs) for the same fixed design configuration. The power divider may then be fine tuned by the full-wave softwares to obtain an optimum design for the divider. The method of least squares may also be used to design power dividers with arbitrary power division ratios at their output ports. A two section six-port divider is fabricated and measured in the S-band (with centre frequency 3 GHz). It has achieved an insertion loss of 0.5 dB, relative bandwidth of 45% (for the four-port application) and 54% (for the three-port application) and isolation among the output ports better than 15 dB.